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World War II

Bernard Julius Otto Kuehn (1895-Unknown) and his wife were German-born spies for the Japanese government. They provided the Japanese with intelligence related to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941. After serving a long prison sentence, Kuehn and his family were deported to Germany. For more information, see: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2005/february/kuehn_022105.

Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (1911-1988) was a German-born atomic scientist who emigrated to Great Britain in the late 1930s. He worked on the joint U.S./British effort to build the atomic bomb. Following an FBI and British investigation, Fuchs was convicted of espionage in Great Britain for supplying atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Fuchs file is tied closely to that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two U.S. citizens who were convicted in 1950 of passing atomic secrets to the USSR. The file ranges from 1949 to 1976.

Tokyo Rose
Iva Toguri D’ Aquino (1916-2006) was one of a group of English-speaking women who participated in a World War II Japanese radio propaganda program. These women were collectively referred to as “Tokyo Rose.” Iva Toguri, an American trapped in Japan when war broke out, served as a host named “Orphan Ann” for a Radio Tokyo program called the Zero Hour. After the war, two reporters portrayed her as the “Tokyo Rose,” and she was later tried and convicted of treason, in part based on their exaggerations. In 1977, she received a presidential pardon. This release details the investigation of D’ Aquino.

Adolph Hitler (1889-1945) was leader of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party and Chancellor of Germany from 1933-1945; he led that country into World War II in 1939. The documents in this file range from 1933 to 1947, but primarily fall either in 1933 or between 1945 and 1947. In 1933, the FBI investigated an assassination threat made against Hitler. In the aftermath of Germany’s surrender in 1945, western Allied forces suspected that Hitler had committed suicide but did not immediately find evidence of his death. At the time, it was feared that Hitler may have escaped in the closing days of the war, and searches were made to determine if he was still alive. FBI Files indicate that the Bureau investigated some of the rumors of Hitler’s survival.

Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph (1906-1996) was a German-born rocket engineer and Nazi party member. He was brought to the United States to work for the U.S. Army and NASA after World War II. The attorney general asked the FBI to review internal security aspects of his immigration into the U.S. for permanent residence.